History Comes to Life With Tweets From Past

LIKE watching a building collapse in slow motion, a Twitter
account run by a group of German historians provides hour-by-hour
updates of the horrors of Kristallnacht, which culminated in a night of
anti-Jewish terror 75 years ago in Nazi Germany that plunged the country
on a path to the Holocaust.

The account, @9Nov38,
for the date of the widespread violence and destruction of synagogues
and Jewish-owned businesses across Germany and Austria, is practicing
what could be called “historical tweeting” — using the brevity and
immediacy of Twitter to recreate events from the past as if they were
playing out before our eyes.

“Most people in Germany know very much about the topic because of
school,” said Moritz Hoffmann, a 29-year-old history graduate student at
the University of Heidelberg, who is one of the five historians who
operate the Twitter feed, which is in German. Despite that awareness,
the 140-character format still manages to stir people. “We got a lot of
responses from people who actually wanted to research their own
families’ historical role in Kristallnacht — their own story of
Kristallnacht in their town,” he said, “which is all I want.”...